Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; Spectrum: NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/T. Fang et al.
* This matter is made up of hot diffuse gas, which is known as WHIM (warm-hot intergalactic medium).
* To get this result, researchers analyzed X-ray light from a distant quasar that passed through a "wall" of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth.
Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; Spectrum: NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/T. Fang et al.
“...which is known as WHIM (warm-hot intergalactic medium).”
Somebody call Al Gore!
We have “GALACTIC WARMING”!!!!
Both the distances and timespans involved here are difficult to grasp.
Norm, have you by chance seen one of the latest editions of the National Geographic Atlas of the World? They now include not only detailed topographical maps of the earth and all we know about the known planets, but also a three dimensional model of known space out to millions of light years away.
The distances involved here are so vast that the entire Universe could have blown up a million years ago, and the blast front won’t even reach us for another few million years, but when the light from the explosion finally reaches us it will be far too late to do anything about it....
"Dark Matter" comes in two varieties: ordinary matter ("baryonic" dark matter) which simply isn't reflecting or emitting light and "non-baryonic" dark matter which is a weird theoretical form which doesn't interact with light yet still exerts a gravitational influence.
The thought of exploring just our own galaxy is mind boggling. Yet our own galaxy is around 100K light-years in diameter housing 200 billion or more stars...is only a grain of sand on the beach compared to the universe as a whole.
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